4e: Playtest Report #5

Team 1 takes to the field today, settling in to their new location, a swamp town known as Emerald Marsh.  They arrived at a rough time for the town, as it was being torn apart by tensions between the churches of Melora (the goddess of the wilderness, and the sea) and Erathis (the goddess of civilization and cities.)  The rampant urbanization of the town is the result of the work of Mayor Tarrin, a halfling of some repute as a businessman.  Unfortunately, a string of disappearances of loggers from Emerald Marsh’s logging camp have raised fears and tensions, and this is where Team 1 comes in.

Villain Spotlight #2 The Thrill Killer

Welcome to the second installment to Villain Spotlight, where we go through the various villain archetypes that can be used for any game and any scale. Today, we’re looking at the Thrill Killer, one of the more common and diverse kinds of villains to be used in an rpg.  The Thrill Killer comes in all sorts of motivations, methods and madness, but they’re always good for a target of worthy adventurers.

Villain Spotlight #1 The Cardinal

Welcome to Villain Spotlight.  For the next few days, I’ll be going over the various villain stereotypes, their variants, and how to use them in a game as centerpiece antagonists of any scale.  The advice in this article is system generic, but may have examples for 4e, nWoD or other more obscure games just to give an idea of how the stereotypes are implemented in a game.

That being said, let’s hit the ground running with The Cardinal.

4e: Dungeon Building and Environments

It’s easy enough to think that D&D should alway take place in a dungeon with gray walls, flickering torches, mold growing on the walls, and with the occasional rat scurrying under your adventurer’s feet while they walk through yet another door to find a skeleton draped protectively over a treasure chest covered in cobwebs.  It’s iconic, easy to envision and almost always the kind of thing that pops into a gamers head when we mention dungeons.

However, it doesn’t always have to be this way.

As a GM, we enjoy having no limit to our special effects budget.  A dungeon can be so many other kinds of environments that it’s staggering.  Today, we’ll take a look at how a little bit of imagination, some research, and even some sources can be used to make a memorable dungeon outside of gray walls and 10-foot wide hallways.

4e: Manufacturing the Opposition

Things are going into full swing over in my 4e campaign, with Team 2 gearing up to head towards a desecrated temple to face a Demon Slavedriver and his horde of goblin thralls, and Team one sailing their way towards the Maya inspired region of the world, where insidious horrors await them in the jungles.

And now I reach the point where I let go of the prebuilt stuff in the Monster Manual and begin cobbling something together.  Enter: the Monster Creation Rules of the DMG.

Rites of Spring

Rites of Spring is the third supplement of the excellent Changeling: the Lost series, and doesn’t disappoint when it comes to doing what supplements were supposed to do:  expand the game in both mechanical and conceptual scope.

Rites of Spring concerns itself with the magic of the Fae, and how that magic works for them.  As beings fundamentally twisted from the human template to become something else, the Changelings are suffused in magic.  It is a magic that defines them, their dealings with each other and the world around them.  While the corebook gives a good idea of how they work, Rites of Spring opens the floodgates when it comes to the myriad possibilities of their nature.

4e: Playtest Report #4

After the not quite so smooth start with 4e, Team 2 manages to rally themselves together with a combination of good rolling and a measure of more teamwork.  As I described in 4e: Playtest Report #2, this team managed to survive a goblin ambush after losing two of their 4 characters to goblin trickery and focused fire.

This time the entire party was complete, and Victor, the player who started off with an eladrin wizard, opted to go for a human ranger instead.  With the shift in roles (3 strikers and no controllers) I opted to alter my mix of monsters to not be quite as Minion heavy.  Minions might be 1 hp each, but they can still prove to be a threat if they were to swarm the players.

The party finally makes it to the town they were meant to visit, and after a bit of in character roleplay, and introducing the new Ranger into their midst, the party is caught by surprise as a panicked townsman cries out that the town is under attack.  The Adventurers storm out to find that a Goblin shaman and a warband were there, with the shaman growling in roughly pronounced Common, “We told you: No soldiers, no adventurers… now this town will burn!”

Metagame Rewards: An example analysis

The discussion on the previous Metagame Rewards article spun off the question of “All of this is well and good to know, but how does it work in the context of an actual gaming group?”  As such, I’d like to take a shot at showing how the previous concepts we’ve introduced come into play when handling my gaming groups for the current 4e D&D game that I’m running.

I’ll be talking in broad strokes here as I’ve discussed these with the players before and put up a few of my notes in my earlier entry: “Campaign Construction Part 4: the Characters“  That being said, let’s begin with a summary of preferences of both teams:

Metagame Rewards, or the Different Kinds of Fun

During the discussion on Rewards in the previous article, we touched on the idea of Metagame Rewards.  To put it simply, metagame rewards are a form of reward that encourages the players to keep coming back.  These aren’t things “in-game” that boost character stats, or represent new gear, these are the rewards that make the player himself lean back with a grin, look the GM in the eye and say, “Great Game!”

So, what constitutes Metagame Rewards?  For this, I’ll paraphrase from Amagi Games’ excellent article “What-I-Like Glossary” which goes on to discuss the different types of fun that motivate players:

4e: Encounter Builder Checklist #4 – Rewards

Now that we’ve discussed the various encounters as according to motive, and type, let’s move on to another topic that deserves notice when building an encounter:  The payoff.  Rewards are what motivate play in D&D, and it’s the constant knowledge that besting an encounter will result in some form of satisfaction that keeps players looking for the next big thing.

Much like everything else, the DMG actually tackles the issue of giving rewards, even going so far as to provide Treasure Parcels per encounter that the GM just has to tick off on a list as he doles them out.  But beyond that, let’s take a look at the types of rewards there are for an encounter and how they’re best utilized.